Last week, I shared stories about a record heat wave that has
been causing severe fires, drought and medical emergencies in
Australia. This week, I was pleased to see climatologists and
meteorologists in the U.S. take time to explain to average people
how we can have bitter cold amid a phenomenon called climate
change, which is raising the average temperature across the
Earth.
By the way, January was the hottest month ever for Australia,
according to an article by BBC News,
telling just how bad it got. Temperatures have moderated the past
few days.
After I woke up one morning last week, I noticed that there was
a thin layer of water coating the outdoor furniture and concrete
around our house. I stepped outside and felt a fine mist in the
air. I wondered, could this be the “scattered showers” that weather
forecasters had talked about?
Surely, a “mist” is different from “showers,” which is also
different from “rain.” But where does one end and another begin
according to the experts? A little help from the glossary of the
American Meteorological Society revealed that the proper term for a
very light precipitation is “drizzle.”
My curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself going
deeper and deeper into the terminology for precipitation, both
official and unofficial, first in English and then in other
languages.
They say it’s going to start raining steadily any day now and
that we could be headed for rainy La Niña conditions this winter.
So I thought it might be fun to pay tribute to the common — and
especially the uncommon — umbrella.
The polite umbrella: Pull a
string on the handle to squeeze through tight spaces or walk
through crowds without poking someone.
I never knew people could be so creative with umbrellas, whose
basic design goes back at least 2000 years when these devices were
used by Chinese royalty. It remains unclear whether the first of
these folding canopies was used to protect against sun or rain,
according to a documented entry on Wikipedia.
Because umbrellas date back to antiquity, I guess I can’t search
out the original patent, although it is said that the U.S. Patent
Office has submissions with more than 3,000 plans to improve on the
umbrella’s basic design. See the entry in
Mental Floss.
As for etymology, the word “parasol” comes from the combination
of “para,” meaning stop, and “sol,” meaning sun. However, if you
want to stop the rain, then the French word “parapluie” comes into
play. “Pluie” is a French word for rain, coming from the Latin
“pluvial.” So, from now on, you can grab your parapluie when you go
out into the rain if you would rather not carry an umbrella.
Raindrops pounding on a special
conductive material in the umbrella fabric sets off LEDs to light
the way. // Source: Yanko Design
Oddly enough, the word “umbrella” seems to come from the Latin
“umbra,” which means shading or shadow, making “umbrella”
synonymous with “parasol.” The Latin word for umbrella is
“umbella.”
Contrary to common belief, the word “bumbershoot” does not come
from Great Britain, and the British do not commonly use this word.
Rather bumbershoot was American vernacular, first showing up in a
dictionary in 1896, according to an article in World Wide
Words.
Getting back to amusing umbrellas, you can go far afield in a
search for a stylish, elaborate or finely decorated umbrella. You
can seek out whimsy or prankishness in the design, such as in the
umbrella with a squirt gun in the handle. You can also find items
that meld the ancient with modern technology, such as a blue tooth
device to answer the smart phone in your pocket or the miniature
video projector for watching movies in the top of your
umbrella.
A squirt gun in the handle of
an umbrella can break up the monotony of the rain, which refills
the pistol.
I’m not sure why I have never written about umbrellas, given the
dozens of webpages and advertising sites devoted to the subject.
I’ve selected five of the best websites for you to check out:
One video producer gathered up pictures of unusual umbrellas,
including some not shown in the websites above. Complete with
music, the video can be found on YouTube.
The video below is a demonstration of a specialized umbrella by
a one-legged man named Josh Sundquist, who has the greatest
attitude about life and problem solving. If you want to know why
Josh doesn’t just wear rain gear, listen to what he has to say at
2:23 into the video. And check out Josh’s
other videos, including a stand-up routine (no pun intended)
about amputees on
airplanes.
By the way, I have never owned an umbrella in my entire life,
preferring to wear a rain jacket with a hood on most occasions,
although rain pants sometimes come in handy. After looking at
hundreds of cool umbrellas on the Internet, I think I will choose
the perfect one for me. Then again, naaaaah!
Atmospheric scientists with NASA and the University of
Washington chose a doozy of a week on the Olympic Peninsula to
launch their four-month effort to measure precipitation and
calibrate the super-sophisticated Global Precipitation Measurement
(GPM) system.
The heart of the GPM system is an advanced satellite called the
GPM Core Observatory, designed to measure rainfall and snowfall
from space. If the system can be perfected, meteorologists and
climatologists will have a fantastic tool for measuring
precipitation where no ground-based instruments are located.
When the Doppler-on-wheels
radar system arrived at Lake Quinault, skies were clear and the
ground was dry. // Photo: UW Atmospheric
Sciences
To improve the satellite system, ground-based radar and other
equipment were moved to remote areas of the Olympic Peninsula to
take measurements (see video below). Meanwhile, aircraft flying
above, below and inside the clouds were taking their own
readings.
The program, called Olympex for Olympic Mountains Experiment, is
impressive. Researchers chose the west side of the Olympics because
that’s where storms arrive from the Pacific Ocean, laying down
between 100 and 180 inches of rainfall each year. Sure, these folks
were looking for rain, but did they really know what they were
getting into?
Heavy rains arrived, raising
the waters of Lake Quinault and nearly flooding the equipment on
Friday. // Photo: UW Atmospheric
Sciences
On Friday, a Doppler-on-wheels radar system was nearly flooded
when between 4 and 14 inches of rain fell in various portions of
the Quinault Valley, raising Lake Quinault by about six inches per
hour over a period of several hours. For details, check out
science summary for the day, which describes some of the
measurements that were taken.
“We’re not just checking the satellite’s observations, the way
you might double-check a simple distance measurement,” said project
manager Lynn McMurdie in a
news release from the University of Washington.
“We’re checking the connection between what the satellite sees
from space, what’s happening in the middle of the storm system and
what reaches the ground, which is what most people ultimately want
to know,” McMurdle said. “So we’re not just improving the
satellite’s performance — we’re learning how storm systems
work.”
NASA’s “Precipitation
Education” website explains how weather systems from the
Pacific Ocean are experienced on land and how Olympex will sort
things out:
“Large weather systems arrive in the Pacific Northwest from the
ocean, and not all parts of the system are equal. The leading edge,
called the pre-frontal sector, tends to be warmer and have steady
rainfall. Next, the frontal sector marks the transition from the
warmer air to the colder air and processes that produce rainfall
are often most intense in this region. Finally the post-frontal
sector, characterized by colder temperatures, will often bring
showery rain and snow, and can produce large snowfall accumulations
at higher elevations.
“The (Olympex) field campaign will be looking inside these storm
clouds with ground radar and aircraft instruments to determine the
accuracy of the GPM satellite constellation in detecting the unique
precipitation characteristics in these different storm sectors.
“One of the aircraft will be flying through the clouds to make
detailed measurements of raindrops, ice particles, and snowflakes
as they are falling to Earth’s surface. Combined with data from the
ground radars and the total amounts caught by the rain gauges and
other instruments on the ground, scientists will be able to improve
the computer models of precipitating clouds – the same types of
computer models used to forecast the weather and project future
climate.”
If you’d like to learn more about Olympex, check out these
sources:
It was the clever headline that caught my attention: “April
flowers bring May showers?”
But it was the latest research about pollen from the University
of Michigan and Texas A&M that got me digging a little deeper
and eventually arriving at the subject of clouds and climate
change.
The bottom line is a possibility that pollen from trees and
flowers can break apart during a rainstorm. The broken pieces can
then float up into the air and seed the clouds for the next
rainstorm.
Allison Steiner, associate professor of atmospheric, oceanic and
space sciences at U-M, began exploring how pollen might seed the
clouds after sweeping a layer of pollen off her front porch one
morning and wondering what happens after the pollen drifts into the
air.
Atmospheric scientists have never paid much attention to pollen.
It is generally believed that pollen grains are too large to seed
the clouds. Instead, most attention has been focused on man-made
aerosols, such as particles from a coal-fired power plant. High in
the atmosphere, the particles can encourage moisture in the air to
condense, the initial step in the formation of rain.
But people with allergies may recognize that their symptoms grow
worse after a rainstorm when the air begins to dry out. As Steiner
explains in an
M-I news release:
“When we were looking in the allergy literature we discovered
that it’s pretty well known that pollen can break up into these
tiny pieces and trigger an allergic response. What we found is when
pollen gets wet, it can rupture very easily in seconds or minutes
and make lots of smaller particles that can act as cloud
condensation nuclei, or collectors for water.”
In a laboratory at Texas A&M, Sarah Brooks, a professor in
atmospheric sciences, soaked six different kinds of pollen in
water, then sprayed the moist fragments into a cloud-making
chamber. Brooks and her colleagues found that three fragment sizes
— 50, 100 and 200 nanometers — quickly collected water vapor to
form cloud droplets, which are 10 times bigger than the particles.
(It takes about 6 million nanometers to equal a quarter of an inch,
so we’re talking about very small particles.) Brooks noted in a
Texas A&M news release:
“Scientists are just beginning to identify the types of
biological aerosols which are important for cloud formation. Our
results identify pollen as a major contributor to cloud formation.
Specifically, our results suggest that increased pollen could lead
to the formation of thicker clouds and longer cloud lifetimes.”
The effect of cloud formation on global warming may be the most
important mystery in climate science today, according to Jasper
Kirby, a particle physicist who is leading a team of atmospheric
scientists from 15 European and U.S. institutions. Consequently,
the effect of aerosols on cloud formation must be equally
important.
Clouds are known to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back
out to space, but they can also contain heat at night, so cloud
formation plays a critical role in determining the rate of global
warming. To better predict global warming, one has to better
understand when and how clouds are formed at a “very fundamental
level,” Kirby told reporter Rae Ellen Bichell in
“Yale Environment 360.” Kirby added:
“By fundamental, I mean we have to understand what the gases
are, the vapors, that are responsible for forming these little
particles. And secondly, we have to understand exactly how quickly
they react with each other and how they form the aerosol particles
which … constitute the seeds for cloud droplets. And this process
is responsible for half the cloud droplets in the atmosphere. It’s
a very, very important process, but it’s very poorly
understood.”
In the upper atmosphere, aerosols can directly reflect sunlight
back into space. These include man-made aerosols from industrial
pollution as well as natural aerosols, such as volcanic eruptions
and desert dust and now possibly pollen. Check out NASA’s webpage
on
“Atmospheric Aerosols.”
Steiner, who is doing the pollen experiments, said understanding
natural aerosols is critical to understanding climate change:
“What happens in clouds is one of the big uncertainties in
climate models right now. One of the things we’re trying to
understand is how do natural aerosols influence cloud cover and
precipitation under present day and future climate.
“It’s possible that when trees emit pollen, that makes clouds,
which in turn makes rain and that feeds back into the trees and can
influence the whole growth cycle of the plant.”
For people more interested in the allergy aspects of this story,
I found a website called pollen.com, which
identifies a variety of ways that weather can affect pollen and
thus allergies:
A mild winter can lead to early plant growth and an early
allergy season,
A late freeze can delay pollen production in trees, reducing
the risk of an allergic reaction,
Dry, windy weather increases the spread of pollen and worsens
allergy symptoms,
Rain can wash pollen out of the air, reducing the risk of
exposure to pollen, but
Rain can also increase the growth of plants, especially
grasses, increasing the pollen levels.
Last year, Washington state experienced its fifth-hottest year
in 120 years of records maintained by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
Meanwhile, records for average temperatures were broken in
California, Arizona and Nevada, which lived through the highest
averages in 120 years. Oregon had just one hotter year on record,
while Idaho had three years with higher averages.
In Washington, the average temperature for the year was 48.4
degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.3 degrees above the long-term average.
Hotter years were 1934 with 49.1 degrees; 1958, 49.0 degrees; 1992,
48.7 degrees; and 1998, 48.6 degrees. In 2004, the average
temperature was 48.4, the same as this year.
California’s record high was based on an average temperature of
61.5 degrees, with Arizona at 62.3 and Nevada at 53.1. Oregon’s
average of 49.5 degrees was exceeded only in 1934, when the annual
average was 49.9 degrees.
For the nation as a whole, the average temperature in 2014 was
tempered by some fairly extreme low temperatures in the Midwest,
stretching into the Mississippi Valley. For the contiguous United
States, the average temperature was 52.6 degrees — 0.5 degrees
higher than the long-term average and tied with 1977 as the 34th
warmest year on record, according to information from NOAA’s National
Climatic Data Center.
Despite several months of record and near-record lows across the
middle of the country, no state had an annual average that set a
record for cold or even ranked among their five coolest years.
For the contiguous U.S. as a whole, last year was the 18th year
in a row with an average temperature above the 120-year average.
The last year with a below-average temperature was 1996. Since
1895, the temperature has risen an average of 0.13 degrees F per
decade.
Precipitation across the contiguous U.S. was 30.76 inches last
year, or 0.82 inch above the 120-year average. That makes it the
40th wettest year on record. On average, precipitation has
increased by 0.14 inch per decade.
For Washington state, 2014 was the 16th wettest year on record.
The average across the state was 48.73 inches, some 6.7 inches
above the 120-year average.
Above-average precipitation occurred across the northern states
last year, while the Southern Plains and Central Appalachians
experienced below-average conditions.
Drought conditions continue in California, despite near-average
annual precipitation. Exacerbating the problem is a three-year
rainfall deficit combined with record-high temperatures this past
year.
Meanwhile, drought conditions improved across the Midwest and
Central Plains, though both improvements and declines were observed
in various parts of the Southern Plains, Southwest and
Southeast.
Washington state had its fourth-wettest spring on record, while
Kansas had its third-driest spring. Other seasonal conditions can
be found on the NCDC’s “National
Overview” for 2014. The “Climate at a Glance” page can
help you break down the data by state and time period.
Global data and analyses from NCDC are scheduled to be released
tomorrow.
